React Native and Flutter have both matured significantly in 2024-2025. The "which one should I use" answer has become more nuanced as both frameworks addressed their historical weaknesses.
React Native's New Architecture (released stable in React Native 0.73) replaced the JavaScript bridge with JSI (JavaScript Interface) and Fabric renderer. JSI enables synchronous communication between JavaScript and native code — the asynchronous bridge was the source of most of React Native's performance complaints. The New Architecture brings React Native performance much closer to Flutter for most real-world use cases. Expo SDK 50+ builds on the New Architecture and makes project creation, OTA updates, and app store builds dramatically simpler. For JavaScript/TypeScript teams, React Native with Expo is now a first-class mobile development experience.
Flutter uses Dart and compiles to native ARM code with its own rendering engine (Skia, now Impeller on iOS). This gives Flutter complete control over every pixel — consistent rendering across Android and iOS, with no native UI component dependencies. Flutter's performance is consistently strong, and the hot reload experience is excellent. The gap: Dart has a smaller talent pool than TypeScript, and integrating with native device APIs (Bluetooth, ARKit, camera customization) sometimes requires writing platform channel code.
Hiring and talent: The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey shows Flutter at 10.3% adoption among mobile developers and React Native at 14.8%. TypeScript knowledge transfers directly to React Native — your web team can contribute. Dart requires learning a new language, but it's approachable for JavaScript developers (similar syntax, similar async model).
Performance in practice: Flutter handles complex animations and custom rendering better than React Native. React Native handles data-heavy list performance (with FlashList replacing FlatList) comparably to Flutter. The days when Flutter was definitively faster are over for most applications.
Practical guidance: React Native + Expo for teams with TypeScript/JavaScript skills, for apps that need deep React integration (shared components with a web app), or when hiring velocity matters. Flutter for teams who want consistent custom UI, games/animation-heavy apps, or are building from scratch without a web team to share code with.